"PROBABILITY VAUX, FELIX = FOXX, FELIX?" he queried next.
"PROBABILITY FOXX = VAUX 53%, came the answer from the four things Harold W. Smith trusted alone among all beings on earth.
A better than even chance! The computers had considered the ridiculous proposition that Dr. Felix Foxx, best-selling author and eminent authority on fitness and diet, TV personality and general celebrity whose
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youthful face was known to millions, could be a ninety-four-year-old man named Vaux who had left the country fifty years ago in disgrace after a nationwide drug scandal, and the computers had said fifty-three percent!
It was the equivalent of a surgeon checking out the remains of a man burned beyond recognition, his hands and feet curled into little charred bails, his teeth no more than melted stubs sticking out of crisp-fried lips, and saying, "The odds are better than even that he'll be back on the job in a couple of weeks."
Smith was ecstatic. For no surgeon on earth could match the predictability, the surety, the breathtaking precision of the Folcroft computers. If they said fifty-three percent, then procaine could be the whole key. And Foxx the holder of that key. And Remo was on his way to someplace cailld Shangri-la to talk to Foxx.
"THANK YOU," he keyed in, as he always did when his work with the sublime four creatures had come to an end.
"YOU'RE WELCOME," they responded as they always did.
The precision!
Of course, there was another possibility, one unknown even to the computers, which were unique in all the universe, infallible in all properly programmed matters. The possibility that they were wrong.
Harold Smith's brow creased into a deep furrow. He felt his breath come quickly and shallowly and his heartbeat step up. Dots of perspiration formed on his brow.
Wrong? The Folcroft Four?
And then he took a deep breath, as Remo had once shown him would alleviate momentary stress, and he
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picked up the phone to begin the Song routing connections that would lead eventually to Remo.
There was no point in considering whether or not the Folcroft computers were wrong. If they were wrong, then, as Harold Smith saw it, there would be no reason for living. The world would be thrust back into an abyss of guesswork, hypotheses, hunches, suggestions, half-truths, loopholes, double entendres, wishes, hopes, spells, incantations, and instincts. A world where being on time could mean anything within the boundaries of a geological age; where peas were not only not presented at 9 o'clock, but scattered at random all over the plate, spilling haphazardly into the mashed potatoes and canned gravy.
He shuddered.
When Smith was a young boy growing up in Vermont, his mother had introduced him, one winter day, to the feasibility of the impossible. She had taken young Harold through this quantum leap of learning with one sentence. What she said was, "It's not snowing today because it's too cold to snow."
Too cold to snow? Was she kidding? What could be colder than snow? It was practically ice, only fluffy. When it gets cold, it snows. Any colder than that, and . . .
It would be too cold to snow.
The concept had intrigued the precise young Harold W. Smith beyond description. Later, he would come to group the thought of unsnowable cold with other such mystifying paradoxes as liquid oxygen and dry ice. How do you breathe a liquid? Doesn't it clog up your nose? When you put dry ice in a glass of water, does it suck it all up like a sponge?
Even after he understood the workings of these miraculous phenomena, Smith continued to remember
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them with vestigial traces of awe. It was part of the grand scheme of things. Some things just were. Dry ice was one of them, and the immutable correctness and utter truth of the Folcroft computers was another, and that was all there was to it.
No, the computers weren't wrong. There was a fifty-three percent chance that Foxx was Vaux and was consequently ninety-four years old and perhaps involved with a drug named procaine to such an extent that he was willing to murder an unknown woman for the minuscule amount in her body; and that somehow this series of possibilities would lead to the combat-type killings of two military leaders, spaced one day apart.
The phone at the Shangri-la address kept ringing.
There was a fifty-three percent chance that Remo was in the middle of something even the Folcroft computers would have called strange.
Chapter Eight
"You're how old?" Remo gasped, switching on the lamp with its pink light bulb.
It had been great sex. Perfect sex. Hot, inventive, passionate, tender, first-time-in-a-car sex. Only this was in a bed, and the spectacular blonde beside him had just shattered the women's record for duration and frequency. She was not only fast, she was supersonic. And good, really good. There hadn't been any romance to sweeten the pie, as it were, either. No meaningful talks, no outpouring of private dreams. Just plain old jump-on-the-bones sex, and it had been the best he'd known since Roseanne Ziewiecki let him have it in the baseball field behind the orphanage when he was fourteen.
Roseanne knew what she was doing, but the pale blonde with the kitten face and the ocean-blue eyes had to be the most experienced sexual partner ever placed on the planet. And now Remo knew why.
"I'm seventy," she purred, stroking his thigh. "And a half."
"Seventy?" He had already withered beyond redemption. That had happened the first time she told
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him her age. Now, with the second blast of the same bad news, his stomach churned as he was swept by a wave of oedipal guilt trimmed around the edges with a border of pure absurdity. "Seventy?"
"There's no need for pretense here," she cooed. She cradled Remo's hand expertly in her own. At seventy, Remo thought, she'd had her share of hand holding. "We're all young here. That's what we pay for." She laughed softly. "Go on, admit it. You're up there, too, aren't you?"
"No, no part of me is up there," Remo said truth-. fully. "Down. Very down."
She stood up in a huff, her perfect flanks glistening without a hint of a stretch mark in the moonlit bedroom. Remo tried to piece together the events that had brought him here to this bed, where a seventy-year-old woman was undulating before him with the healthy abandon of a young colt.
He and Chiun had arrived at Shangri-la less than an hour before. Getting into the place had presented no problem after he ditched the car he'd rented at the En-wood train depot. No cars were permitted on the grounds. "They detract from the timeless ambience of Shangri-la," the guide had said haughtily.
The guide-a chauffeur, as it turned out-drove the guests through the snow-covered hills, along narrow roads, and into a huge landscaped clearing in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence with an even higher electronically controlled gate.
"Welcome to Shangri-la," the guide said in the midst of the vast snow-capped greenery where the road stopped.
Chiun speculated unpleasantly that Shangri-la was an expensive version of KOA Kampgrounds, with the
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lot of them getting their massages and carrot cocktails, while building igloos for the night. But as they walked, the place, the Shangri-la, mecca of dreams, giver of youth, refueling station for Bobby Jay's BPs en route to the rigors of life on the Mediterranean, appeared.
It was a monstrous place, a mansion of Victorian dimensions, but with the requisite Hollywood touches of an Olympic-sized swimming pool and kiieg lights calling to the illustrious guests like beacons in the dark. Still, despite the elegant trappings, there was something sinister about Shangri-la. A word out of old vampire novels kept springing into Remo's mind. Unwholesome. The place had an unwholesome air about it. Remo could almost smell it. Chiun said he did smell it.
"Or maybe it is just the smell of so many whites," he said.
The guests themselves were no longer any surprise to Remo. Many were famous names, which Remo could dimly pick out from among his early memories. All were robust, attractive, stylish, rich, and young. Senator Spangler and his wife stood by the fireplace inside the sprawling parlor of the house, chatting with a group of handsome young people dressed in their expensive best. Bobby Jay was standing by the grand piano in the corner snapping his fingers and singing an off-key version of "I Love the Boy I'm Near."